Play
Directed by Matjaž Berger
Produced by Anton Podbevšek Teater
Opening night: June 5 2024
More info: antonpodbevsekteater.si

Beograjski trio (The Belgrade Trio), written by acclaimed film-maker Goran Marković, is an intriguing, genre-ambivalent text. It combines archival documentation — records, reports, diplomatic correspondence, official notes, extracts from diaries, letters, police and military documents, marriage certificates, encrypted spy messages, and even meteorological reports — with fiction.

The story takes place in Yugoslavia just after World War II, following the Tito-Stalin split. Lawrence George Durrell, the notorious writer and cultural attaché, appears in Belgrade, sent by the UK to the Yugoslav capital as a spy. He is tasked with locating the remnants of the royalist movement in Serbia. During his assignment, Durrell falls madly in love with Vera, his Serbo-Croatian teacher. When her husband Bor, loyal to Stalin, is arrested and sent to the re-education camp on Goli Otok, Vera refuses to change her surname and renounce Bor. As a result, she winds up in the internment camp for women on Sveti Grgur isle. Durrell devises an audacious plan to rescue Vera and her husband.

Idealists are often accused of being out of touch with reality. This is, of course, nonsense. Labour camps have always been full of idealists and romantics who refuse to betray their beliefs, their loved ones, and other people. The Belgrade Trio makes it clear: idealists are intimately, painfully familiar with reality. The best way to avoid facing reality is to become a realist or pragmatist.

The play, the seventh collaboration between Berger and Silence, features fourteen instrumental tracks.